1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information handling system communications, and more particularly to a system and method for managing switch and information handling system SAS protocol communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
One consideration in the design and production of information handling systems is the communication of information between processing components of the information handling system. For instance, information stored in memory, such as hard disk drives, typically is communicated to a processor for use by the processor. Historically, information was passed across parallel buses within the information handling system, such as by using the SCSI protocol to communicate with hard disk drives. More recently, serial buses have provided greater data transfer rates than are available from parallel buses. For instance, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) protocol provides greater data transfer rates for hard disk drive storage devices than the SCSI protocol, however SAS remains compatible with SCSI commands. The SAS protocol supports rapid transfer rates within an individual information handling system as well as in distributed storage systems, such as JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) systems and RBOD (RAID enabled JBOD) systems. Even more rapid communication is possible with alternative bus protocols and structures, such as with Fibre channel buses, that also provide greater functionality with fabric management capabilities.
Although the SAS protocol specification does not define fabric management capabilities, SAS has gained acceptance in some portions of fabric-like markets. For instance, the SAS protocol supports communication between multiple hosts and an RBOD through a switch known as an SAS concentrator device. One example of information handling systems configured in such a manner is a blade server having multiple blade information handling systems interfaced with an RBOD through an SAS concentrator switch. A difficulty that arises in this environment is that a management application associated with the switch does not know what blade information handling systems are connected to what end devices because of the lack of fabric management capabilities in the SAS protocol. The lack of fabric management capabilities means that no topology information is available to define device name to port address mapping. Without such topology information, some desired functions are unavailable, such as setting up zoning of the various blade information handling systems to defined storage devices. In an attempt to address the lack of topology information, some proprietary solutions run applications on each node within an SAS domain that provides address information to each other. However, installation and management of the separate applications tends to be complex and, as a proprietary solution, presents end users with the need to learn different types of solutions for different types of systems.